Another Year-End Wrap-up

Posted a very belated 2010-in-review last month here which mostly covered the start of (finally) recording. As promised, here’s a slightly less-belated overview of what we got done in 2011. And it’s shorter.
Essentially, worked all year through, which is to say every day or two for at least an hour or two, and…still not done come new year’s. Really, by the end of ‘11, the burning question on the minds of dozens (counting us & dependents) had become not, “where’s the record?” but ”did you sell the van?”.
Yes, yes we did, thanks. It involved stolen/unreturned license plates, a failed police report and gestures and profanity that embarrass me now, thrown out in the middle of our street to a man who was rolling up sleeves in prep. to kill me. But we sold it.
W/ recording, through 2011 we continued as before / below (tracking Kev’s songs w/ drums, then overdubbing & changing those) and we began overdubbing drums onto Charles’ songs. An important, if only geekly interesting, distinction between recording drums first & overdubbing them later: most albums you hear, esp. if they’re made in say, the last 40 years, are recorded drums-first (usually along with a guitar or two, bass etc., which may or may not be kept through to the final version). Then responsible recording engineers and their band-clients will overdub (that is, record on top of already-existent recorded material, in this case, those drums) the guitars, bass, vocals, cool loops, field recordings, requisite xylophone etc. after that, fitting them in sonically to the initially recorded drums.
Like anything else, this approach has its pros & cons, but trying to not go on for pages, let’s come back to that some other time, preferably over a beer and at least a few booths away from the nearest drummer or recording engineer (of which I’m neither).
Anyway, it’s sort of way less common to do the song first – that is, record a few hundred guitars, vocals, some low-end meanderings, work out an arrangement etc., and then overdub the drums onto that (and then change the song even more, of course…). But that approach was famously good enough for S&G’s Sounds of Silence and it’s worked out surprisingly well for us. And was sort of fun done that way to boot. Well, ‘fun’ if you’re us and fun is measured in the ease of drum overdubbing.

That’s really about it for us for 2011. The other thing that seemed to happen a lot that year was some friends’ & colleagues’ beginnings & endings in 2011. Ends first…..
Our good & longtime friend Cory Brown drew the curtain on Absolutely Kosher, the label he founded in 1998, putting out records by a sultan’s variety of great bands (Xiu Xiu, the Mountain Goats, Frog Eyes, Jim Yoshii Pile-Up, Pinback etc.). And us. It was our pleasure & honor to release our last record, the Meadowlands, w/ Cory on AbKosh and our love for him knows few bounds. This article & interview w/ him sums up the standard reasons for the hiatus, mostly financial (here):
And 2011 marked the passing of Alan Meltzer. We got to know Alan when in 1995, he bought out Grass Records, our label at the time (later retooling it into Wind-Up Records), while we were recording our second album, Secaucus.
For a few months that spring, Alan was seeming more and more to be our career-savior, then for a while after that he filled the role of nemesis nicely. Biographically for us, the nemesis part stuck.
Beyond that, for a nemesis and all, I think Alan probably never gave us another thought, being pretty busy releasing Creed's oeuvre.
And we really only thought of him, I don’t know, every time we heard one of those Creed songs, which is to say every 6 ½ minutes for 5 years, shaking our fists cartoon-villainly in the air while muttering crap like, “You’ve made a powerful enemy, Alan!” or “that should have been me, for I am the brightest star in the firmament!”.
Ok, hopefully obviously, not serious. We’d gone our separate ways with no regrets on our side certainly. And clearly, the only way we’d ever have been a Creed, or as big as Creed, or had & recorded our own My Own Misprision, would have been locked in a room, with limitless space-time, alongside 100 monkeys typing Pearl Jam.
(Disclaim: these cheap ‘n’ easy Creed one-liners would have – I think – been ok with Alan. He had a pretty good sense of humor about all of this, at least w/ us. And besides, all career jokes ultimately point back to us).
We met again with Alan a few years back when Wind-Up reissued our earlier albums (to dozens of sales worldwide, presumably), ostensibly to bury the hatchet but I think both sides were relieved to find that the other guy wasn’t even carrying one. We’re happy that our relationship w/ Alan ended on a positive note. Alan was an interesting dude and our belated condolences to his friends & family.

On the cheerier side, beginnings in 2011….
There were a handful of friends who put out really nice albums, most of them debuts, that in our considered opinion didn’t get enough attention, so here’s a little list (w/ full disclosure: our own charles played on a couple of these and is married to at least one of them. In spite of that, all highly recommended):
* Palomar, who actually also went on hiatus in 2012; album/ep: Sense & Antisense
* Bird of Youth; album: Defender
* The Former Soviet Republic; album: The Former Soviet Republic Is Made Of This
* Overlake (in 2011, then called Big Lake); EP: Do You Love Me? Yes/No

Well, so much for short.
The wrens
Keeping folks waiting (for the end of any paragraph, most sentences, all blog posts and the occasional album).
Since 1989